Odd Girl Out (16 page)

Social media plugs right into girls' obsession with relationships—and their fear of losing them: on the one hand, technology allows girls exhilarating, instant access to their peers. Yet social networking sites like Facebook also make friendships tangible and public,
²⁸
allowing girls to compare and judge others' relationships:
She has
800
Facebook friends, but I only have
350.
She got nine comments replying to her last wall post, but only two people bothered to respond to mine.
This is a new kind of "popularity math," a test of likeability where anything you post can be "liked" and rated by your peers.
²⁹
Friendships in the online habitat have become yet another item to measure oneself against—like bodies, boyfriends, and grades—and so another painful source of jealousy, insecurity, and anxiety among girls.

Like bullying in real life, cyberbullying does not erupt from thin air. It is often the endgame of a drama that originated in the more mundane interactions that dominate girls' lives. In a recent study, Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin, founders of the Cyberbullying Research Center, found that 84 percent of cyberbullying targets reported being bullied by someone they knew, such as a friend, exfriend, former romantic partner, or classmate. Less than 7 percent of youth in this same study reported being cyberbullied by a stranger. (The rest did not know who was bullying them.)
³⁰
To really understand girls and cyberbullying, then, we have to examine their day-today online exchanges, where the fuse of cyberbullying gets lit. In this chapter, I journey through the sprawling virtual landscape of BFF 2.0, from its darkest corners to its most traveled byways.

Media and culture would have us believe that children are "digital natives," while their clueless parents and educators are "digital immigrants." This is a dangerous myth.
³¹
The idea that there is nothing at all strange or foreign to children navigating technology suggests adults are the ones who need educating. But social media involves at least two discrete sets of skills: the ability to manipulate the gadgets, and the capacity to interact safely and responsibly. The two are not related, and ease of use does not guarantee a grasp of its consequences.
³²
Navigating the virtual world requires new skills that must be learned and practiced. Just as girls starting school need tools to resolve the challenges of their "real-life" relationships, girls online require the same.

Unplugging is never the answer, just as staying home from school will not resolve conventional bullying. The phone or computer is not merely a device. It's a window to a world that, for most girls, is as compelling and active as their "real" world.

 

cyberbullying

My mother picked me up after school on the days Abby made my friends run away from me. When the car door closed, I knew I was safe. Today, the end of school no longer offers relief. Cell phones and social networking sites tether girls to their bullies day and night, making cruelty impossible to escape. As Internet safety expert Parry Aftab has said, cyberbullying follows you everywhere: to grandma's house, to sports practice, to dinner.

The cruelty moves as swiftly as it does widely. Before social media, bullying was slowed by the pace of physical relationship: It took time for girls to catch up and share. There was also less time to talk. Today, texting is social background noise, an accompaniment to nearly every other activity girls do. Researchers report a significant increase in "multitasking," or using more than one form of media at the same time, among teens.
³³
Information is abbreviated, omitting important subtleties of a situation or feeling. It is also churned out addictively; the average American teen sent three thousand texts every month in 2010, and the most slanderous texts went viral with whiplash speed.
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Girls live in their very own twenty-four-hour news cycle. Where the bell once rang at day's end, giving girls a chance to rest and recharge, texts and chats now fly at all hours, including the middle of the night, when we are all least reasonable. Some girls sleep with cell phones under their pillows or on their chests, so they can feel the vibration and awaken. It is not uncommon for a Facebook status update to read, simply, "text"; meaning, I can't be reached this way, so find me another way. Find me at all times.

Add to this a radical change in privacy in girls' lives. Much of girls' social interactions online are now played out in public. On Facebook, where the age of use continues to shrink, the live news feed format runs a vertical crawl of endless updates: how friends feel from moment to moment, who they interact with and who their newest friends are. At the center of each user's personal page is the Facebook Wall, a kind of bulletin board where friends can "tack" messages to say
heyyyyy, happy birthday, what's tonight's homework?
Moments better left private—a girl and her friends making plans that may exclude others, a friend who posts inside jokes or leaves cryptic messages that make others insecure—are now broadcast with a few simple clicks.

Imagine being a girl who feels socially insecure and seeing, on your friend's wall, a post that simply says, "OMG" [oh my God]. She may think,
What does
that
mean? Is something happening? Why don't I know about it? Is it about me?
Sitting alone in front of a computer, she becomes anxious and assumes the worst. She may begin contacting others for more information, starting a chain of gossip that could set off a conflict about an issue that does not even exist in the first place.

Few girls learn about the insecurity, hurt, or betrayal these public online interactions can inspire, or what might happen if they make assumptions based on what they are reading; instead, girls simply
do
it, because everyone else is doing it, and because it is an inevitable part of being a twenty-first-century girl. As communication becomes more impulsive, quick, and public, it also becomes coarser. This is not necessarily because girls are trying to be mean, but because turning private interactions public can alter their meaning and impact.

The change in privacy has given rise to new norms among girls, especially when they are angry. Before social media, the most ganging up girls could do after hours was via a three-way phone call. Today, social networking sites allow hundreds of people to watch and throw their two cents into the mix. What an adult grew up thinking belonged in a journal, or vented quietly to a friend, is today easily shared and commented on by multiple peers. Girls who might fear live confrontations in front of peers now unleash online status updates and away messages filled with anger, frustration, and threats: "I wish," wrote a middle-school girl on her public Tumblr, which is a kind of online journal, "everyone knew what a lying piece of s——t you are." Within twenty-four hours, hundreds of peers had either reposted the comment to their own page, or declared their loyalty by "liking" the comment. "[W]ow people should really grow up ... no one likes people that are b——ches, and come up with different lies everyday to make themself [sic] look cool!" posted a high-school girl on Facebook. Into the fray jump peers whose comments
("loveeee u girl" "OMFG" "haha"
) betray varying agendas: sympathy, loyalty, backup, revenge.

Like summer thunder, online fights can erupt with little warning. A single misinterpreted remark can start a war. After an eighth-grade girl commented, innocently enough, that a photograph of her group's alpha female resembled another girl, friends swarmed the page, attacking her. As the girls barraged her with insults ("how about you go behind doors and CUT yourself" and "wat makes u think we care about ur life"), another crowed, "shutdown," while the target tried to defend herself. Eventually the other girls began declaring their love for each other ("I love you ... you guys are amazing friends
") while the target flailed. As one detective told the
New York Times,
"It's not the swear words. They all swear. It's how they gang up on one individual at a time. 'Go cut yourself.' Or 'you are sooo ugly'—but with 10
u's,
10
g's
, 10
I's
, like they're all screaming at someone." The viciousness of the messages is deepened by the public intimacy between the tormentors.

In girls' social universe, information is power. But gossip needs an audience, and getting one isn't easy if you lack status. Online, the social rules change. Technology levels the playing field, allowing girls with less status in real time a chance to make waves online. Should you have trouble getting someone to notice you at school, you are just a few clicks away from the rapt attention of online eyes. Power and status distribute more equally in a world where anyone can write anything that others may believe and act on.

Several studies have found significant gender differences in cyberbullying. Sameer Hinduja and Justin Patchin of the Cyberbullying Research Center found that 26 percent of girls were targets of cyberbullying, compared to 16 percent of boys. Another study found that girls are nearly twice as likely as boys to have rumors spread about them online. Some 22 percent of girls surveyed by Hinduja and Patchin reported cyberbullying others, compared to 18 percent of boys.
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Both targets and aggressors show significantly lower self-esteem than peers who are not involved in cyberbullying. Those victimized by cyberbullying are more likely to experience anxiety, depression, school violence, academic trouble, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts.
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The breathtaking cruelty unfolding online cannot be attributed to only its medium, or the lack of oversight surrounding it. The teen brain is still developing, honing its capacity to take healthy risks and consider the consequences of behavior. Coupled with the burning desire to fit in that beleaguers so many girls, we have a dangerous recipe indeed.

 

In the fall of eighth grade, Kelsey broke up amicably with her boyfriend, Aaron, in a largely white, middle-class, northeastern suburb of about thirty-five thousand people. A few weeks later, she regretted her decision. When her close friend and soccer teammate, Lauren, said she liked Aaron, Kelsey remained quiet.

"At first," Kelsey told me in our phone interview, "I got upset, but then I was, like, she's my friend and I want her to be happy." Kelsey kept mum and resolved to enjoy her friendship with Aaron, who had asked Lauren out.

Within days, Lauren was bristling at Kelsey's friendship with Aaron. She texted Kelsey. "She started to tell me to back off, he doesn't like you, he never did, you're not his type." Kelsey refused to end her friendship with Aaron. Lauren posted similar remarks on Facebook for her hundreds of friends to see and comment on.

As it turned out, Lauren and Aaron were short-lived. When Aaron confided in Kelsey about the breakup, Lauren was incensed. "She sent me," Kelsey said, "a seven-page text. It was, like, calling me these nasty names like dumb ho. Aaron wasn't my type, I needed to shut the f——k up, I was a dumb whore, I was ugly, I was fat, I wasn't worth anything [and] I should just go die." In the transcript of the texts, Lauren wrote, "oh and sweetheart be prepared for a rude awakening seeing your gunna have no friends and everyone will hate you sooo much after this one stupid hoe."

Lauren concluded by revealing that when she dated Aaron, "he always told me and my friends how ugly you were and how much he hated you lmao
[laughing my a—s off]." Shaken, Kelsey refused to give in. She also cared about Aaron, who had suggested they begin dating again.

The drama intensified. Lauren enlisted the support of her friends, who sent a blizzard of vicious texts. Dana, one of Lauren's best friends, wrote that "I was a bad friend and that I wasn't worth anything, that she hoped me and Aaron were happy because I would have no friends and everyone would hate me."

Technology eclipses the stages of feeling and reflection that used to precede many conflicts between girls. In a typical conflict, there is shock and anger; there is sadness, confusion, and betrayal. All of these feelings, which girls used to have time to process and react to, are now bundled into quick, digital gusts of emotion. Girls do not take as much time, if any, to sit, reflect, feel, or think.